Unfinished Symphony?

A small circle of devotees gathered in a Manhattan living room one night last week and watched while their host turned the lights low and slipped a tape into his hi-fi equipment. Music flooded the room --passionate, dissonant, moving in great intervals toward massive climaxes, resolving at last into a finale of serene beauty.

It was, one visitor said, "typically Mahler-esque"--which seemed a self-evident remark after listening to Gustav Mahler's Tenth Symphony.

But the fact is, Mahler never completed his Tenth--and last week's tape was, in part at least, no more than an earnest piece of musical fiction. The tape was made from a 1960 BBC broadcast of an orchestrated version of the symphony prepared for performance by English Musicologist Deryck Cooke. After one performance, Cooke's work was withdrawn at the insistence of Mahler's widow, but it lives on in a number of jealously guarded pirated recordings. Meanwhile, Mahlerians passionately argue the ethics of completing a symphony left unfinished at the composer's death in 1911.

Master Plan. The argument revolves partly around the "finality" of Mahler's last draft. Composer Arnold Schoenberg, who was asked by Mahler's widow to complete the symphony shortly after a facsimile edition of the manuscript was published in 1924, decided not to undertake the job. "What his Tenth was to say," wrote Schoenberg, "we shall never know. It seems that the Ninth is the limit." Bruno Walter and other Mahler experts agreed.

After studying the facsimile intensively and "thinking myself into Mahler's mind." Musicologist Cooke decided that he could see "the absolute coherence of the complete master plan. What I had deciphered was not a 'might-have-been' but an 'almost-is': five full-length movements in various states of textural completion, but all sufficiently coherent to add up to a magnificent Symphony in F Sharp; a symphony in two parts." Cooke's BBC version runs 65 minutes and according to his own complex figuring, the various edited parts of it are anywhere from 80% to 95% pure Mahler.

Final Version. Dr. Erwin Ratz, president of the International Gustav Mahler Society, demurs. The trouble with Cooke, says Ratz, was that he misunderstood how Mahler worked. The composer normally went from sketches to "raw scoring" to a final version, and, according to Ratz, he was at least two years away from a final version of the Tenth. "Even with his finished works, Mahler did retouching in the instrumentation after a few performances; you cannot say that Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth have the same character they might have had if Mahler himself had lived to perform them." An even greater problem: not all Mahler experts agree that the composer had decided in what order he wanted the symphony's various movements arranged.

Cooke's Tenth may not be Mahler's, but in time it could conceivably become the accepted version. When the copyright on the manuscript runs out, and after that, notes one Mahler enthusiast, anyone could do anything with the Tenth--"even turn it into a musical comedy. God forbid."

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